Internet and politics

The Internet (World Wide Web) came into widespread use in the mid-1990s. Its main impact on politics is probably to increase transparency. Governments and non-governmental organizations have posted millions of Web pages of political information such as official reports and contact details. Several governments including that of the UK have set targets for an ever higher proportion of citizens' business with government to be conducted via the Internet. Equally, the Internet gives a cheap and easy platform to extreme parties, conspiracy theorists, terrorists, and paedophiles; as always, politicians tempted to blame the media for the message have attempted to impose controls on the Internet. Because of its origins as a network of military communications designed to reroute messages in the event of nodes being destroyed by war, it is probably uncontrollable in such ways.